The new economy may be in the hands of people incapable of operating heavy machinery - or even walking. Just ask Peter Troob, coauthor of Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle, who once witnessed a fellow investment banker fall asleep midstride and walk face first into a wall. "Falling asleep while standing is ridiculous enough, but doing it in motion takes a special sort of exhaustion," he says.
While not always so extreme, exhaustion is common in an economy where employees, VCs and executives are continually burning the midnight oil. In the frenzied startup phase, Internet workers often go with minimal or no sleep for days at a time - a habit that can wreak havoc on more than just their motor skills.
But many suffer in secret. "Everybody working in new media knows they're not sleeping enough, but nobody wants to admit it's affecting them," says Tristan Louis, CEO of startup Moveable Media.
Michael Montero, CTO and cofounder of the online community firm Community Connect, says that when his site launched, "at one point I had to stay up nine straight days working to fix a bug in the database software." He adds: "I just got the odd hour or so of sleep beneath my desk. For my birthday that year my coworkers bought me a pillow for the office."
"You can't function when you're that tired," Troob says. "People make typos, mess up Xeroxes or show up at the airport six hours early because they can't read their tickets correctly."
James B. Maas, Ph.D., sleep researcher at Cornell University (dossier) and author of Power Sleep, says that "when people are severely sleep-deprived, they lose verbal and problem-solving skills, can't concentrate and undergo rapid mood swings." Many disasters over the past 20 years have involved worker exhaustion, including Chernobyl, the Challenger explosion and the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And while no major technology failures have yet been attributed to sleep deprivation, the Internet Economy seems to demand that people make vital business decisions, requests for funding or technical fixes in such a state.
A programmer who asked to remain anonymous says that late one night, after working for two days with very little sleep, he inadvertently erased his company's Web site server, including the operating system. It took him four more sleepless hours to get the site running again. "But I don't feel too bad about it," he says. "I know at least five other people who've done the same thing."
Many tech workers don't have a choice about how much they sleep. "The technology field is developing so quickly that you sometimes have to sacrifice sleep to take advantage of a market opportunity," says Bruce Green, president of Greenhouse Technologies, a software development and consulting firm. "The most common question I get from my clients is, 'How quickly can we move on this?'" Green often works a 36 to 40 hour weekend.
Some companies are trying to help employees adjust to irregular sleep. Fremont, Calif.-based portal GoYogi.com targets the global Indian population, which means employees have to stay conscious during daylight hours in India, as well as in the United States. India is 13 hours ahead of the U.S., so conversations usually start around 8 p.m. says Suneeta Krish, VP of business development. Krish says that so many employees were asleep under their desks one time that the cleaning staff thought street people broke into the building. To encourage employees to get enough rest, the company recently converted some of its offices into sleeping quarters.
Krish says GoYogi's employees have not only learned to cope with the odd schedule, but they also have benefited from it. "Working hard through these conditions has actually helped us bond," says Krish. "We work together much more cohesively now."
There's no doubt that sleeping less provides several extra hours to get work done, and some clients may be impressed by the kamikaze "we'll sleep when we're dead" attitude. One source, who declined to be identified, says, "Saying anything about sleep deprivation means losing business to companies who won't even acknowledge it as a factor."
